From politics to platforms, from advertising to algorithms, power is exercised through language today. English departments cannot afford to retreat into silence.
For a pretty long time, English studies simply got by on inherited prestige. It stood like an old colonial bungalow that everyone admired from the outside, but no one bothered to inspect too closely. Literature was assumed to be humanising by default, as if reading automatically made you a better person. What’s more, reading itself was regarded as a moral good. The act of aesthetic appreciation, meanwhile, became a kind of cultural badge: proof that you were refined or educated.
Let’s admit it upfront: English departments are no longer taken for granted. Rather, they find themselves on trial one after another. The chargesheet is almost familiar: no jobs, low demand, poor returns. Amidst the spell of placement graphs and skill dashboards, literature appears like a flamboyant subject of self-indulgence: slow, wordy, and disconnected from the concrete realities of the job market. Parents worry, administrators panic, and policymakers sharpen their spreadsheets, as anxiety about the future hardens into a demand for numbers, skills, and proof. And quietly, almost politely, literature is asked to explain why it still deserves to exist as its value is ambiguous, unquantifiable, and stubbornly resistant to the utilitarian language of the market.
The demand for English departments did not wane because they were insufficiently “useful” in the narrow economic sense. While economies were mutating into zones of precarity, students were taught how to interpret texts, but not always why interpretation mattered when the cost of living or housing was unaffordable, when work was unstable, when language itself was being weaponised in newsrooms, courts, and algorithms. By and large, the gap between textual subtlety and social urgency widened, and English studies often lacked the vocabulary or the courage to bridge it.
Institutions fail literature
Students do not arrive at universities already convinced that English literature is useless; they learn this from prospectuses, policy language, career cells, and parental anxieties. The first mistake universities make is treating “low demand” as a natural student preference rather than as an institutionally manufactured outcome. When administrations repeatedly describe literature as “non-core,” “low-return,” or “non-employable,” they actively train students to avoid it. In some ways, demand collapses not because literature fails students, but because institutions fail literature.
The job market today is not a stable landscape into which students neatly step after graduation. It is a shifting terrain, cracked by automation, platform capitalism, and artificial intelligence. Roles appear and vanish within a decade. Skills learned today risk becoming obsolete tomorrow. Yet, our educational imagination remains stuck in a narrow, industrial logic of training students for specific tasks rather than preparing them to think, interpret, and adapt.
Seeking transferable intelligence
Why do we work, anyway? For Gen-C, work is no longer only or even primarily about income. It is increasingly a search for meaning, autonomy, and self-actualisation. This is a generation that asks different questions from its predecessors: not just “What do you do?” but “What else can you do?” Not “Is this secure?” but “Can I leave if it breaks me?” Mental health is not a weekend hobby or a side concern; it is built directly into how work-life balance is imagined. As a result, instead of betting everything on a single, fragile identity such as an engineer, manager, analyst, etc. Gen-C tends to invest in transferable intelligence: the capacity to learn quickly, read situations, tell stories, adapt across roles, and switch tracks without burning out.
What literature produces is not a single job pipeline but adaptive intelligence: the ability to move across roles in unstable labour markets. The study of literature trains students to interpret complex situations, read contexts, recognise bias, understand emotion, and engage with ambiguity. These are not abstract intellectual exercises; they are transferable forms of intelligence that shape work across sectors. Journalism, publishing, civil services, law, policy research, advertising, cultural management, education, media, UX writing, content strategy, public relations, and even technology design rely heavily on narrative competence and cultural literacy.
What makes us human
In Technics and Time, Bernard Stiegler argues that the human is never just a biological creature; we become human through technics: through the tools, media, and symbolic systems we learn to inhabit. From cave paintings and alphabets to books, archives, and now digital platforms, technics store experience outside the body. They organise memory, structure attention, and quietly shape how time, thought, and even desire are lived. In this sense, learning a language or reading a text is never a neutral act. It is an initiation into a particular way of thinking and being in the world.
This is why writing, language, and narrative are not cultural luxuries which we can afford to downgrade when budgets tighten. They are technologies of thought.
Literature, as one of the oldest and most complex memory technologies we have, has long done more than just tell stories. It has shaped how societies imagine work and worth, how labour is valued, how skill and experience are passed on across generations. Long before “employability” became a policy keyword, various literary genres including novels, plays, and poems were already asking what kind of work is meaningful, who gets recognised for it, and what forms of labour remain invisible.
Society saturated with language
We live in a paradoxical moment. Never before has society been so saturated with language. We swim in text messages, tweets, captions, memes, manifestos, push notifications, brand stories, and outrage cycles. Seen from this perspective, EdTech does not arrive as a benign upgrade to education. It appears as the latest frontier of platform capitalism, a system that does not simply distribute knowledge but actively re-organises how knowledge is experienced, measured, and monetised.
Friction as a design flaw
In the EdTech regime, texts are not meant to be wrestled with. They are meant to be processed. What matters is not depth but throughput: how fast a student moves, how much they complete, and how smoothly they transition from one module to the next. Comprehension is no longer an interpretive act but a clickable outcome verified by quizzes, dashboards, and progress bars that glow green when the system is satisfied.
What disappears in this transformation is the most vital moment in reading: the long, hesitant pause before a difficult sentence. That pause, when meaning refuses to arrive on demand, is where thinking actually begins. It is the space of doubt, rereading, misreading, and sudden insight. Yet, within the logic of EdTech platforms, this pause is reclassified as inefficiency. Friction is a design flaw. Difficulty becomes a bug to be eliminated rather than a condition to be endured.
The ideal reader, accordingly, is no longer the patient interpreter but the frictionless user. This reader does not linger, argue, or get lost; they move cleanly through the interface. They click, scroll, submit, and advance.
In this sense, EdTech does not merely change how students read; it reshapes what reading is allowed to be. It trains readers to expect immediacy, clarity, and closure, leaving them ill-prepared for texts and worlds that resist easy understanding. And when such readers later encounter literature, law, political rhetoric, or ideology itself, they may experience not curiosity but irritation: Why doesn’t this make sense to me immediately? Why does it demand so much time?
Literature has long been suspicious of systems that claim to be simplistically rational. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 captures this moment when Yossarian realises that survival in the military has nothing to do with courage and everything to do with paperwork. The joke cuts close to the bone. Each time he completes the required number of bombing missions, the quota is calmly raised. No one orders him to die. The system simply updates its rules until death becomes the most efficient outcome.
Yossarian’s revelation is not that war is brutal (that’s so obvious), but rather that the system doesn’t care. As the missions continue to increase, the rules keep changing. No villain twirls a moustache. Readers see, with a shudder, how power often operates not through brute force but through perfectly reasonable systems that leave no room for appeal.
Language cannot be reduced to a skill
The words available to us determine how we name experiences, frame emotions, assign virtue or blame, and imagine futures. You don’t first think and then speak; you often think through language.
To change the words we use is often to change how we experience the world itself. We feel through metaphors, clichés, and inherited expressions. Grief, love, anger, hope and all arrive already shaped by cultural language. In the digital age, this becomes even clearer. Algorithms do not just transmit language; they rank it, amplify it, and bury it. Language now determines not only what is said, but what is seen.
In this context, literature teaches us to recognise irony, gaps, contradictions, and circular logic in verbal and nonverbal expressions. This is why language cannot be reduced to a “skill” or a “soft competency.” It is very the medium through which thought, power, memory, and identity are organised.
Unfortunately, the damage begins when English is stripped of its identity and repackaged as a service subject: “communication skills,” “soft skills,” “placement readiness.” Once that happens, the hierarchy is obvious. Core disciplines think; service courses assist. Students understand this instinctively. If English is only about proficiency, why spend three years on a degree when an online course can achieve the same goal faster and more cost-effectively?
The irony of the employability debate is that employers often complain that the new graduates lack critical thinking, effective communication skills, sound ethical reasoning, and empathy. Yet the very disciplines that cultivate these capacities are the first to be delegitimised or defunded in the policy documents. We end up training students for roles that machines will soon perform better, while neglecting the forms of intelligence that machines cannot replicate.
The future may not belong to those who merely compete with machines or obey outdated job-market logic. It may well belong to those who can interpret, judge, narrate, and imagine. Artificial intelligence can already write code, analyse data, generate reports, and even draft legal documents. As automation accelerates, many technical roles will either disappear or be radically transformed.
Fatal invisibility
Against this backdrop, the question “What job will literature give me?” is a wrong question. The more urgent question is: what kinds of jobs will survive automation, and what forms of intelligence will remain uniquely human?
Demand for English literature will not increase by selling it as employability training, simplifying it into skills, or apologising for its existence. It will increase when departments regain intellectual confidence. Literature departments once shaped public debates through little magazines, translations, criticism, and fictional imaginations. Today, many have retreated into covering portions and classroom assignments, invisible beyond campus walls. That invisibility is fatal. No student wants to enter a discipline that already appears to be a lost cause.
If literature truly offers no jobs, why does the world run on words? From politics to platforms, from advertising to algorithms, power is exercised through language today. English departments cannot afford to retreat into silence. They must re-enter public life through debate, podcasts, writing, translation, and critique. When universities stop teaching students how to read the world, students will stop enrolling in the disciplines that once taught them exactly that.
Instead of pushing for a shutdown of literature departments, what is required is a radical relaunch. Literature departments must reimagine themselves as poetic interfaces between humans and non-human entities. Along with classics and canonical texts, they must engage with emerging domains of experience such as digital cultures, algorithmic narratives, cinematic imaginaries, and platform-mediated attention economies.
Literature moulds us to pay attention in an age of distraction, retrieve memory in an age of forgetting and instil reflection in an age of instant reactions.
(Sudeesh K is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Yeshwanthpur Campus, Bangalore.)
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